The proposal for a bridge connecting San Francisco and Marin County overcame unlikely odds. Ferry companies fought it because it would cut into their profits carrying some 50,000 commuters a day into the city. Environmentalists thought it would be obtrusive.

US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, center, wears a steel helmet during an inspection tour of the San Francisco tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, on March 25, 1935.
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It is said that advocates of the bridge began to spread drawings of what it might look like, and its beauty won over the opposition. District voters approved a $35 million budget.

On July 9, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a button that that set off a charge of dynamite, starting construction work on the historic bridge over the San Francisco Bay.

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Crews dug out some 3.25 million cubic feet of dirt to plant the bridge's 12-story-tall towers. Workers dove from a platform to depths of 90 feet to blast away rock and remove debris.

Workers at the top of the tower, which will support the suspension bridge, are shown during construction of one of the catwalks for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, on October 17, 1935.
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At 4,200 feet, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge built at that point. It required 1. 2 million rivets, 80,000 miles of spliced wire, and 254 steel suspender ropes.

The bridge had an impressive safety record for the time. Still, 11 workers died in four years of construction — 10 on one day when a scaffold fell and tore through a safety net.

Workers install the first section of a huge safety net, at a cost of $130,000, that will extend from shore to shore beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California, on September 2, 1935.
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